Field of the Invention
Embodiments described herein relate to a secondary storage system that supports multiple types of workloads. More specifically, embodiments described herein provide a secondary storage system that can run non-production workloads while also providing data backup or protection to a primary storage system.
Description of the Related Art
Workloads on a computer system are a way of characterizing the demand on the resources of a computer system due to a particular task running on the computer. For example, some types of workloads place extreme demands on the CPU while other types of workloads place extreme demands on the disk subsystem. Often, workloads that place extreme demands on the disk subsystem are those that require a high number of random I/O operations. These operations thus cause the throughput of the disk system to drop substantially, making the system almost unusable, especially in the midst of other workloads attempting to use the system.
A primary storage system usually stores data for enterprise applications. For example, a primary storage system may store data for a cluster of physical computing systems or virtual machine instances running on a physical server system. The primary storage system operates to provide fast, high-availability storage for the enterprise applications.
A secondary storage system is used to provide data backup and protection services for the primary storage systems supporting the enterprise. Secondary storage systems are often used only for data protection purposes, despite the fact that they may provide powerful computing power. This occurs, in part, because secondary storage systems are optimized for serial I/O operations used to capture data from the primary storage system. In addition to storage systems, an enterprise may deploy a variety of other systems or appliances to perform non-production tasks, such as business analytics or test and development clusters to develop, install, configure, and deploy enterprise software applications. A secondary storage system optimized for serial I/O operations is ill-suited to perform these tasks. As a result, an enterprise may deploy one system that provides the data backup and protection services for their primary storage systems and deploy other systems to run test and development applications, analytics, etc. However, dedicating numerous separate secondary systems to each individual workload becomes inefficient and wasteful. At a minimum, it leads to a need for more physical systems, as well as to duplicate data, creating a maintenance problem.